America’s Legitimacy Crisis—2

A Trump victory next November would be very bad. But moves to prevent him from appearing on ballots could be just as bad

Credit: Delpixart (iStock / Getty Images Plus)

Writing for mainstream media outlets often ends up being quite a ride. Unlike with my posts for Substack, where the audience is self-selecting and so predisposed to respond to what I write with some sympathy or at least patience, writing for the New York Times or (as with my column about the Colorado Supreme Court decision last week) CNN sends my ideas and arguments to a much broader and often more hostile audience.

That’s how I’ve ended up receiving a torrent of angry, insulting, and sometimes threatening tweets and emails in reaction to my take on the 14th Amendment gambit. Sometimes such messages are merely irritating. But often they’re instructive and useful for my work. It’s good for me to see how people predisposed to take a sharply different line express their disagreement. What do they object to my arguments and evidence? What arguments and evidence do they adduce to prove I’m wrong and they’re right?

I’ve seen some range in the more thoughtful critiques, but the bulk of them put forth some version of what this reader has to say in the following representative statement, which I’m sharing anonymously.

Trump DID lead an insurrection and should be disqualified. The Republican losers that back him can go pound sand and whine like the ignorant babies that they are. Just because he is the leader in their demented minds, the rest of us should be assured that an asshole like Trump can never be anywhere near the White House again.

The insults directed against Trump and those planning to vote for him in these sentences aren’t gratuitous. They are part of the point—both here and in the somewhat more restrained versions articulated by my subscribers in the comments to my previous post. They could even be stated more strongly (excuse the language): Fuck Trump and his moronic supporters. If they don’t like us disqualifying him for the presidency, they can go to hell. This is the Constitution we’re talking about, and Trump clearly, obviously, indisputably deserves to be disqualified, no matter what his brainwashed dittohead supporters say or think.

Trump the Authoritarian

I’ve long had two tracks in writing and warning about Trump and what he represents. Read one and I sound like a committed progressive liberal helpfully using my education and writing to warn Americans of the dangers Trump and the MAGA movement pose to American democracy.

Read the other and it sounds like I either harbor tacit Trump sympathies—or that (in the eyes of my critics) I’m a wimp, a coward, a pathetically fearful and politically useless weakling who’s ready to capitulate in the face of fascists. I should stop playing Neville Chamberlain and have the guts to stand up and fight the would-be dictator with any means available. And thankfully, in this case, there’s a section of the 14th Amendment right there to do the job for me. How can I even consider hesitating to apply it to the insurrectionist running for president again?

My long essay for the Times this past fall about the right’s intellectual catastrophists fell into the first category. My CNN piece from last week fell into the latter.

So what explains the divergence? Am I suffering from split-personality disorder? Or is there some kind of rationale that could explain the two approaches?

Unsurprisingly, I take the latter view—and this post is my attempt to explain it.